FANS of “Lost” will have to wait more than three months now to find out if three of the show’s most beloved characters escape captivity alive – on a show famous for killing off its stars.

Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) ended last night’s fall season finale on the cusp of freedom after weeks of being kept as prisoners by the mysterious group of islanders called The Others.

Jack, a spinal surgeon, had just begun to remove a deadly tumor from the group’s leader, Ben, a.k.a. Henry Gale, when he nicked an artery and threatened to let the patient die if his friends weren’t set free. To make matters more tense, Jack had briefly escaped his cell earlier only to find a closed circuit TV monitor on which he saw Kate and Sawyer holding each other after having sex.

The love triangle between the three has been a staple of “Lost” since the show’s first episode last year.

It was also revealed that Kate, a killer and a bank robber, was once briefly married to cop.

Viewers will now have to wait until Feb. 7, to find out what happens next. Meanwhile the producers of “Lost” say last night’s fall season finale cliffhanger was meant to aggravate fans of the show so that they’ll be hungry to watch the series when it returns.

“It will hopefully be good enough to incur major frustration from the audience as to, ‘How dare we go off the air for 13 weeks and leave them hanging in that fashion!’ ” executive producer Damon Lindelof told TV Guide Online.

“The angrier we make them the better the cliffhanger I guess,” says executive producer Carlton Cuse, echoing Lindelof.

After just six new episodes, ABC yanked the show off its schedule for 13 weeks so that it will be able to air the final 16 or 17 episodes without any repeats through next May. While HBO has frequently made the same move with hits like “The Sopranos” and “Sex & the City,” it’s a gamble that no major network was willing to take until now.

Lindelof and Cuse promise that when the show returns it will tie-up many of the loose ends that have been left dangling since last year. “I think there are some upcoming episodes – after the break in the spring – that will answer a number of the open questions.

We certainly plan to tell the audience this year how Locke (Terry O’Quinn) got in the wheelchair,” added Cuse.

Lindelof also says much of the new episodes will be devoted to, “Peeling back layers of who The Others are, how long they’ve been on the island, what their origins are. That’s really the sort of uber-plot of season three.”